Apple released a brief announcement late Sunday afternoon, Cupertino time, that it would hold a conference call and webcast on Monday morning to talk about plans for its jumbo, humongous, Brobdingnagian, elephantine, and gargantuan cash hoard.

Users reportedly still able to post on weibos despite strict registration rules

Users of China’s hugely popular social media platforms must now register with their real-names if they want to be granted posting rights after a strict new government ruling came into force on Friday night, although reports suggest that the rules have yet to be enforced across the board.

Apple’s legal troubles in China took a turn for the worse at the weekend after it emerged that a group of writers filed a 50 million yuan (£5m) lawsuit alleging that the fruity tech giant is illegally selling unlicensed copies of their books on its App Store.

Analysis China’s mobile phone market is about to hit an epic milestone of one billion users, but experts are split over whether the country’s 4G plans will succeed, while opportunities for non-local tech companies could become increasingly limited in the region as homegrown mobile platform players emerge.

An Australian artist, Richard Bell, has won a case against a film-maker who asked Vimeo to remove a film about him. His lawyers say it is “the first time damages have been awarded where a third party had content removed from the Internet without legal justification.”

Energy giant E.ON is to seek private investment for three large offshore wind farms, it has announced. The investment would be in addition to the €2 billion it said it will invest itself in the projects.

One thing Apple's doing with its massive cash mountain: giving punters more iPad for their money. The News iPad - aka the iPad 3 - costs as much to buy as the iPad 2 did, but it costs a lot more to make.

The premise behind Belkin’s dual-band travel router is simple: you arrive at a hotel with multiple devices capable of connecting to the internet over Wi-Fi, but there’s only one connection in the room and it’s Ethernet-shaped.

Bethesda's Skyrim is an immersive experience as it is, but combine it with a set of Sony VR goggles and Microsoft's motion-sensing add-on, Kinect, and you get one of the most fun-looking gaming rigs I have ever seen.

Twitter and Facebook are failing to create the sort of news revolution that some Web2.0 junkies might like to believe is already largely in play, a new report about the current state of media has revealed.

Prototypes of a new tiny, ultra low-power ARM-licensed processor will be demonstrated at an engineering conference in California next week. The chips are so small and energy efficient that they're aimed at wirelessly hooking up kitchen appliances, light bulbs and 'leccy meters to your network. And to the CIA.

An alleged member of hacker group LulzSec appeared in a London court on Friday charged with conspiracy over cyber-attacks against websites maintained by the CIA and the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency.

Let’s cut to the chase. The "new iPad" doesn’t have the much-rumoured haptic touch technology. In fact, its list of major new features can be counted on the fingers of one hand. It doesn’t even have a number after its name. How disappointing is that?

Apple has announced that it will begin issuing a per-share dividend of $2.65 per quarter, and will also initiate a share buy-back program. Together, these efforts will reduce Cupertino's cash hoard by about $45bn in the next three years.

Good news, frequent flyers: the US Federal Aviation Administration is to once again assess whether gadget owners should be allowed to use their tech toys throughout flights, not just when their aircraft is up in the Big Blue.

Billions of years ago, before Earth's atmosphere had oxygen, it periodically possessed a "haze" of organic chemicals including methane, boffins have discovered. During these periods the planet's air was more like that of Titan, ice moon of Saturn, than the stuff we breathe today.

Our piece last week on Eddie Murphy's cinematic train-wreck A Thousand Words - a possible nominee for the worst film ever - had El Reg commentards queuing up to recount their celluloid nightmare experiences.

Citrix Systems is tweaking a bunch of tools that it has tailored for its XenDesktop desktop virtualization and XenApp application virtualization tools, and is using the opportunity to remind everyone that there is a perfectly legal – in the Microsoft-licensing sense of that word – way to stream Office applications down to end users.

Acer has launched an iCloud-like cloud data-sharing service as part of its PC business re-energising initiative. Consumer users with AcerCloud can now share a content library on their Acer PC with Android tablets and phones across all brands.

The Sydney Opera House “will be looking into” appearances under its roof by controversial Monologist Mike Daisey. The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs a monologue Daisey performs in which he describes practices at the Foxconn plant where Apple products are made, was last week disowned by influential US radio program This American Life.

Yet another big-data company has come out of stealth mode, and this one, called ClearStory Data, has its sights set on making it easier for companies to mash-up and visualize data sets rather than just focusing on data-munching itself.

The uptake of cloud services is accelerating faster than initially thought, and could be a half a trillion dollar business by the end of the decade, Microsoft chief operating officer Kevin Turner told attendees of the Convergence 2012 conference in Houston, Texas, on Monday.

You've got to hand it to Kirill Tatarinov, the head of Microsoft's ERP division. The Russian Rocket was cool as a cucumber on Monday when a demo of the Windows 8 Metro UI running on a touch-screen tablet crashed and burned during the opening keynote of Convergence 2012.

Officially, humans are the only ones who can enter the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, which was held in Brooklyn, New York over the weekend. But this time artificial intelligence expert Matt Ginsberg of On Time Systems has put his Dr Fill crossword solver to the test. As the results show, you don't have to throw out your pencil just yet.